pcb-rnd on windows
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We have a pack in beta testing. It should work on any windows version
from 7 up. (It does _not_ work on XP.)

IMPORTANT: if you use the windows version of pcb-rnd, please send me
an email to:   pcb-rnd-win (at) igor2.repo.hu

I will use this for sampling user demand. If there are no emails, that
means there are no windows users which means it is not worth investing
time in compiling windows releases.

1. download the binary pack and install
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Download the zop from http://igor2.repo.hu/tmp/pcb-rnd-w32.zip

Unpack the zip anywhere, and run pcb-rnd from bin:
- start a shell (cmd.exe), cd to where you unpacked it, cd bin, pcb-rnd
- create a shortcut icon (TODO: what's needed for the exe to find the dlls?)

IMPORTANT: Please make sure there's no space in the full path where you unpack.


2. limitations
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

pcb-rnd is a package designed for UNIX. The windows port does not
change the UNIX aspect of pcb-rnd, thus a few things are different from
a normal windows application:
 - pcb-rnd works from config files, not from the registry
 - pcb-rnd will figure the users home directory and will look for .pcb-rnd/
   in there for the user configs
 - if anything breaks, try to run pcb-rnd from the command line: run a cmd.exe
   and cd to the bin dir within the installation root and run pcb-rnd from
   there watching what it prints to the console.

The usual pcb-rnd policies apply:
 - pcb-rnd speaks English - there's no internalization, no unicode or utf
 - some keyboard shortcuts may not work if your keyboard layout is not set
   to English
 - pcb-rnd uses the keyboard and the command line heavily

There are a few limitations specific to the current windows pack:
 - there can not be space in the path where the pack is unzipped
 - UNC paths (\\server\something) may fail randomly
 - it does not support opengl, it is always doing software rendering
 - some of the export formats (e.g. png) are not yet supported on windows
 - there is no fp_wget support because there's no wget in the pack
   (may work with busybox wget, busybox shipped in the pack, testing required)
 - gsch2pcb-rnd is not supported
 - import schematics with gnetlist has not been tested yet
   (importing tEDAx netlist should work)
 - the windows port may have some overhead; if you find pcb-rnd slow,
   please try it on Linux.

3. Cross compilation from Linux to win32
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(developers may need this, if you are an user, it is safe to skip.)

There is an svn repo that hosts all the sources for the dependencies. From
this, the binary DLLs can be compiled (this step may need some manual
intervention, autotools is not very nice for cross compilation). The result
is the "ultimate hidlib dependency pack" (uhdp), 90+ megabytes of dlls
with gtk, glib, gettext and whatnot.

The uhdp has two versions: the smaller one, with the dlls only, is part
of the pack downloaded by end users for installation. The bigger one,
called the developer pack, also contains the installed headers, .a and
.la files and can be used as "sysroot" for cross-compiling pcb-rnd
(or other software) against.

The uhdp can be donwloaded from http://repo.hu/projects/hidlib.w32

The normal process is:
 - download and unpack the binary developer vesion of uhdp (so you don't need
   to spend long hours compiling all the deps)
 - install mingw for the cross compilation
 - configure pcb-rnd for cross compilation with the uhdp path on -I and -L